psychoak, why don't you pull back cloaking in the dip build, and make a trade pack with romulans as a requirement for cloaking abilities?

btw hate "lingering presence" term, I would prefer "blackbox", or " last known position".

Federation cloak research is for a capital ship ability.  No Romulan allies, and your Defiant can't get three levels in it's ability set.  Pact ability unlocks must, by nature of the game design, be frigate related.

So far I've thought of tolerable solutions for everything but this match up.  I can use more ideas for the rest as well though, especially if they're better than mine.

Just a quick question that I'm kind of embarassed to ask considering I've completed 2 campaigns with the Klingons and am now underway with the Romulans.

Fleet Cloaking.  Shockingly, I never toyed with it when playing with the Klingons, except for their D-4 scouts.  But I'm trying to do fleet actions with the Romulans having a completely cloaked battle fleet.

But is there a way to command the entire fleet to cloak & decloak?

When I select the fleet, or even manually window-select a group of cloak capable ships, hitting the cloak command only results in 1 ship cloaking / decloaking.  I'd have to manually select every single ship to cloak them.

I also saw some cap.ships have "Decloak Fleet" ability, but since I haven't cloaked a fleet yet, haven't seen the effect.

As far as the previous posts about the Dominion "Leviathan" go:  That cap ship is quite powerful and justified in cost.  Respectable firepower, colonony-capable, fleet bonuses (predominantly for Jem'Hadar), enforcing Cardassian loyalty, carrier capability, tough shields, and immediately available.

Play it right and you can do a small Leviathan group (say even 2-3) with frigates running with them early on in the game for a blitz.  Very, very few things can stand up to them.  The inherent fleet benefits they bring paired mainly with their firepower, lasting power (shields), and lots of fighters running interference is a powerful combination early on.

It's a nice little strategy early on for the Dominion to grab good planets early on until you come across stiffer resistance.  By then, I draw up my lines, consolidate, and build up all the places I took over in that blitz.  Then I can start rolling stuff out like the bigger, badass Dominion ships.

The luster of the Leviathan only fades a bit from mid-game onwards.  By that time you should be facing more advanced ships and better established defenses.  By that time a Leviathan is more vulnerable since the AI likes going after them.  You gotta take care of them.  The abilities & benefits they bring, esp. with lots of Dominion ships (i.e. hordes of Dominators) can't be understated.  By mid-game, you definitely should have online more advanced ships for direct fighting.

And the Sovereign is a beast, as it should be.  The pinnacle of Federation technology and the class of ships they transferred the name "Enterprise" to after the loss of the Enterprise-D.  Purpose built due to a higher need for combat capability than even the Galaxy-class.  A levelled up Sovereign with the Nemesis Refit is a joy to have (Torpedoes!  Yay!).  Very few things outside the Borg can face a Sovereign 1 on 1.  I think only the Dominion Enslaver can due to the immense firepower it has.  But as far as being the centerpiece of a Federation fleet, the Galaxy reigns supreme.  The support it offers is outstanding and a levelled up Galaxy is a very tough nut to crack.

I would encourage considering the reversion of the pirate/neutral ships to vanilla, the large mixture of random ships currently used not only looks odd, but also is considerably harder to fight. Until a replacement selection of ships can be created there is little point in replacing them with a selection of random ships imo.

a few of the SINS ships are plausible-looking enough to be included imo for neuts/pirates, modifying their stats and weapons would be more efficient and effective than the current method imo.

That is a nice idea but would be a waste of resources. That planet should only be shown as their home world and I am thinking more like an ice or volcanic variant that can be used across the map randomly. Not hard to do for yourself though, just enlarge the borg cube mesh and use it for the borg planet mesh. Maybe a heavily populated city planet can be used as both borg and random. Not sure yet. Keep the ideas coming.

Wow! lots of stuff to read back on, and way too much to comment on and still have room left on these boards

The last time i screwed around with cloaking it was a very simple, but "functional" cloak, and it only worked on the b'rel. Cloaking the Elites (cap ships) was more of a challenge, and did not work half the time. Obviously the mod has come a long way since (we got better nerds, and code monkeys). When myself, and Darkshimmer tried to implement a full cloak we tried to make the AI use it as well, and failed. I am not sure what the team did to make it work, but for that i am grateful, because cloaking is a must for both Klingons, and Romulans. The original plan was to have ALL Romulan "Military" units be able to cloak, but not all of the Klingon units. For the Klingons we wanted to have the 'canon" units cloak. I never saw the Negh Var cloak so that unit would not be able to. This was to show that the Romulans were totally sneaky bastards, but the Klingons would only use cloak "honorably" (despite seeing dishonorable use of it like the trek VI b'rel). I cant answer how fleet mechanics will be pulled off since it has been so long since i looked at the ability's. I am just glad it is possible.

Planets themselves would still be a low priority since we still have yet to get all of the units in game. However when the time comes we have plenty of ideas on what types to use. A borg planet would probably be like how earth was "borgified" in first contact.

I already made different map backgrounds for the mod. I am surprised they are not being used yet.

Much to comment on, but no time right now. Ill be back.

The cloak is, sadly, player only.

The AI is retarded, doesn't use abilities that aren't defaulted to autocast.  Autocast is not a viable setting for cloaks to be on.  The reasons for this are simple.

You have two basic determinations for how an ability is used.  Circumstance, and condition of the target.  Conditional triggers don't work with on/off buffs, they fire both directions whenever they meet the conditions.  So, you get damaged, trigger the action, and then decloak to be blown up once the cooldown expires.  That leaves you with circumstances, in combat, out of combat, etcetera.  Your ship will then cloak, and stay that way until the antimatter runs out, as soon as you're in those circumstances.  None of them are even remotely useful settings.

If we had code access, I might be bright enough to rewrite it to function with the current system, but the game was not designed with stealth in mind.  The current implementation is designed user friendly, it's as simple for you to use as it can be, one action to turn it on, one to turn it off.  Anything the AI would use poorly will require manual fire of each individual ship to cloak your fleet.

There will be something wrong with them that's preventing their appearance.  For instance, research locked?

hello all long time no see or even speak  !and there are soo soo many pages to read on this thread lol

well RL is very busy so dont have much time anymore to do anything on my pc, however the last few days I have quite a bit of time so been playing the entrenchment release of the mod and liking what you have done with it so far. So keep it up   !! ! !

I am sure i did make the unicomplex bigger than that (or atleast when upgraded it added 7 parts to it not 4 like it looks like now, but i figure its to do with tht 2 gig thing)

looking forward to see how you carry on the borg as well as the rest of the factions in to diplomacy.

I will be around all be it in the shadows watching this mod, and playing or even helping everyone if i can or even if you still need or want, when i have time you know my msn so just grab me on there if u need me.

Loki

Regarding planets...

It would be nice to see a couple with rings (don't know it is possible though) like Saturn, or even maybe moons/satellites instead of "asteroids" for extractors.

As for the sound files - I removed Legacy from my computer awhile ago and can't find the disk (moved several times since then), so someone else would have to upload them.  Maybe you can go onto the official forums and ask (if anyone is still hanging out there lol).

I bought the trinity pack yesterday for this mod only. Was just in an 5 hours game and oh boy was it good. First time I was klingon but randomed a few borg on a huge map and lost

Second time I was dominion and here are some impressions which will hopefully improve the game if the dev team reads these forums

DOMINION ONLY so far.

1.  Dominator (light long range) frigate is useless it has medium armor and antimedium weapons. Galor (light) frigate has medium armor and antiheavy weapons, but due to more dps on galor, it still does more damage to medium armor, has 3x more hp, and around 2x more shields, for a price of around 60gold extra...

2. Anti strikecraft Insidious frigate is also useless Kimal (cruiser) weapons are also antiVeryLight, has more damage, hp, shields, and the intercept ability for torpedoes later on.

3. Heavy cruiser Virulend has heavy armor and composite weapons. Composite weapons are nice damage dealers, but since its heavy armor, light frigates counter it completely due to damage / hp / shield ratio.

4. Starbases have low damage. Dominions first capital ship at level 1 has around 300damage average, dominion starbase upgraded to max has only around 200 max (tooltip information). When I saw a group of 10 mirandas take out my fully upgraded starbase i knew i had to give up on it as a starbase that can hold its own, and turn it into mass production facility/influence base. Same thing with other races starbases, their damage is too low, and you know it is when one klingon Vorcha has higher damage output than a fully upgraded starbase

5. A lot of empty "ability icons" on ships. Would be nice with something random rather than the black icon box.

6. Few tooltip information repetitions, for example "increases damage by 5%", followed again by the same line in research tree. Same with the dominion capital ship that has abilities to increase power to weapons or engines.

7. weapons range has no significance, same with fleets of ships. In vanilla, the fleet would go head to head with light frigates while the long range frigates would attack from the back from a safe distance. In the mod, even if a ship has 5x more range than the enemy, it does not use it and instead flies straight into the mess. When battles start, there is no control or fleet feeling, as all ships (yours and enemy) are flying randomly into each other

Even with that said, I love the mod and hope for future improvements! Once this mod is polished, it will be the best star trek game ever and I mean it.

Played on win7 x64 and SOA2 0.4.6E patched.

1.  Dominator (light long range) frigate is useless it has medium armor and antimedium weapons. Galor (light) frigate has medium armor and antiheavy weapons, but due to more dps on galor, it still does more damage to medium armor, has 3x more hp, and around 2x more shields, for a price of around 60gold extra...

2. Anti strikecraft Insidious frigate is also useless Kimal (cruiser) weapons are also antiVeryLight, has more damage, hp, shields, and the intercept ability for torpedoes later on.

3. Heavy cruiser Virulend has heavy armor and composite weapons. Composite weapons are nice damage dealers, but since its heavy armor, light frigates counter it completely due to damage / hp / shield ratio.

Jem'Hadar, all three of them.  Research their basic abilities, use the Jem'Hadar only support from the Jem'Hadar in the capital slots.  After you do that, a Virulent still blows up fast, but it deals damage on par with the Leviathan.  They are by far the best frigates on the side, with capital support.  Without it, yeah, they suck.

4. Starbases have low damage. Dominions first capital ship at level 1 has around 300damage average, dominion starbase upgraded to max has only around 200 max (tooltip information). When I saw a group of 10 mirandas take out my fully upgraded starbase i knew i had to give up on it as a starbase that can hold its own, and turn it into mass production facility/influence base. Same thing with other races starbases, their damage is too low, and you know it is when one klingon Vorcha has higher damage output than a fully upgraded starbase

First, damage only looks at one aspect.  Chalk it up as an oversight in engine design, there's no display of target counts, and what banks your damage is from have no indications either.  The typical starbase design in vanilla entrenchment is 4 targets per bank.  All of the ships have 1 target per bank.  Damage is not divided per target, it's applied wholesale to each.  So, a 100 damage starbase with 4 targets per bank has the same output as a 400 damage capital ship.  We've changed up the numbers a bit, some ships have two targets in the front bank, a few even have more.  It's basically the same deal though, the starbase has much more damage compared to other ships with similar numbers.

Second, 10 mirandas taking out a fully upgraded dominion starbase...  No.  Not possible.  Even in it's currently bugged condition, at most you could just blow 300 antimatter on a second cast thanks to the cooldown time of 0.  Yeah, I'm a retard.

Two words, Opening Salvo.  A variant of this ability is in the third slot on the Starbase, achieved via the descriptively appropriate upgrade.  The level 1 version has 12000 range on it's target.  From the target it spans a 4000 range radius and selects 12 targets.  These 12 targets take a whopping 5400 damage over the next 24 seconds from a flurry of plasma torpedoes.  So, if 10 Mirandas attack a fully upgraded Dominion starbase, you'll likely notice just in time to see them all blow up.

On the defensive front, your sucky Dominion starbase is indeed a little lackluster on the shield points.  The ability in the fourth slot solves that problem.  Regenerative Shields will restore 100 points per second for 60 seconds at level 2.  I'm not even sure it's physically possible for them to drop one with the right upgrades, the regeneration might be too high.

Dominion starbases fall faster to large fleets, but deal more damage from their awesomely cheesy ability and are impervious to smaller forces.